Not your average sports coat

Corduroy is a divisive issue. I’m always surprised at how often it’s referred to perjoratively. But perhaps it’s not the fabric itself (which, after all, is just a fabric) but the kind of people who wear corduroy? Stereotypically cranky, old professors and snotty-nosed little boys come to mind. But blaming corduroy itself? This seems grossly unfair.



Miles Rohan, founder of the Corduroy Appreciation Club, is a champion of corduroy. The Club “…wishes to cultivate good fellowship through the advancement of greater awareness and understanding of corduroy through the dissemination of information about the fabric and related items.” Like many of my good blog post ideas, a preliminary web search on the topic reveals that the reason corduroy has been preoccupying me these past few months is this article in the New Yorker, which I read and promptly forgot, preferring to believe that I myself dreamed up a piece bringing together Wes Anderson and the development of the horizontal wale.

I do, however, have something to add in support of corduroy. I am a huge fan of printed corduroy. More specifically, vintage Clothkits printed corduroy, circa 1970-80.



Clothkits was an English clothing company that sold garment kits to home sewers. The pattern outlines were screen-printed onto the cloth and the garment pieces themselves were printed with elaborate, multi-coloured designs. The children’s kits often included a matching doll-sized outfit for Cloth Kitty, the Clothkits doll, in the surplus fabric around the main garment pieces. The company issued catalogs that featured models lazing about on haystacks or out tramping through the English countryside.

I pored over these catalogs as a child. My mother continued to order the kits after we moved back to Australia, until import taxes made them prohibitively expensive. In addition to the kits, Clothkits sold wonderfully coloured woolen tights and patterned knitwear. I’m convinced (without proof or justification) that both their garments and catalogs have been a heavy design influence on the Dutch company Oilily.



I recently asked my mother, who rarely throws anything away, if she still had her Clothkits catalogs, but, alas, I was only months too late. A few items still exist, including our Cloth Kitty dolls (both black and caucasian) and two printed corduroy pinafores (details above.) While in Sydney over the new year, I found this flowered corduroy at the Tessuti outlet, now earmarked for a skirt and some bag linings. And I’ve signed up for membership of the Corduroy Appreciation Club, and hope to meet up with this other tribe of mine somewhere, sometime soon, on the eleventh of the month.